Here, Posy Simmonds (Berkshire, 1945) is known for works with literary references such as Gemma Bovery – which follows Flauvert’s Madame Bovary – or Tamara Drew – from Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy – or the latest, Cassandra Darke –a black satire set in the art world with connections to Dickens’s Christmas Carol–, all three published by Salamandra, but her career has been built in the English press, especially in The Guardian, where she has worked as an illustrator and author of comic strips, many of which would later end up collected in a book, such as Literary Lives. She has been through the 42nd Comic Barcelona.
He has always drawn, but for years he dedicated himself more to illustration than to comics…
I had always liked comics, and I keep some that I made when I was 8 years old. At home we were five brothers and there were many comics. My Proustian madeleine would be lying on the grass with a comic on my face, smelling the smell of the ink.
But it didn’t start with them…
When I left graphic arts school, where I mainly did typography, I didn’t know what I would work on, just that I liked drawing a lot, and I took many samples to as many places as I could, and one day the phone rang and it was The Times: I had An illustrator had failed and they urgently needed five drawings that they would have to do right there. And I did it. In newspapers, when you have to close at a certain time, sometimes you don’t know how you do it, but you close.
And at The Guardian he started making comic strips…
I illustrated everything, literature, sports, politics… One day I met my editor in the elevator. He was a man of few words, and he said to me: “Posy, have you ever done a strip?” I was stunned.
He confused strip (comic strip) with stript (striptease)!
I didn’t know what face to make. She explained herself well and offered me half a page, because the man who wrote it was going to the United States.
And later he incorporated literary motifs.
I had been making comic strips with speech bubbles and little text for years, and I wanted to do something different. My editor proposed a series with 100 chapters, daily, in three columns from top to bottom. I didn’t start thinking about Flaubert, but in Italy I saw a woman who reminded me of Madame Bovary and she gave me the idea. I reread Flaubert and locked the book in the drawer.
I didn’t want to do a cover, either.
No, just the spine, and although some readers may recognize the literary features, it is not important either.
He insisted on literature…
Tamara Drewe had to appear in the newspaper’s literary supplement, and my editor asked me to, although I wasn’t clear about it. Writing an advertisement for a writers’ residency that appears in the book, it said that it is not far from the highway and is a beautiful landscape “far from the madding crowd,” a phrase that made me think of Thomas Hardy’s novel.
Today comics are already considered culture.
It is a very rich narrative, regardless of whether there is text or not! It is such an agile medium that it can be used to touch on all kinds of subjects, and I think of Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi…
The sector has gained weight.
Yes, although in the United Kingdom it is not like France or Belgium, where you can find comics in the supermarket, but it is growing and many young women are entering it, although there are also many complaints about precariousness.
You have made a living.
I was lucky to work in the press, yes, but that has also changed, and young people do not read the paper newspaper. But I’ve given it up, I’ve had enough deadlines, and when I turned 75 I thought maybe I could allow myself to relax… and I left the press to concentrate on books.
It’s been a few years since the last…
Yes, but I’m working on a new one, although I had a delay with Covid and my husband wasn’t well, so I haven’t made much progress on the book, but I hope to do so this year.
Catalan version, here
